The Denver Broncos have officially handed the reins to Tim Tebow at quarterback, and in the process have reignited all of the same debates that have run rampant since he was drafted by Denver in the first round. Can Tebow succeed at the NFL level? Can he do it as a quarterback? How can he overcome a not-so-textbook throwing style? And so on.

Former Florida coach Urban Meyer doesn’t answer a plethora of questions about his former quarterback in this interview, but he makes it clear that he feels that the pressure is on the Broncos to put some adequate weapons around Tebow and not so much on the signal-caller himself.

Urban Meyer joined WDAE in Tampa with Ron and Ian to discuss why he thinks Tim Tebow will be successful in the NFL and how he’ll overcome that throwing motion, basically pinning the entire situation on the Broncos.

Why do you think Tebow will be successful as an NFL quarterback?:

“Same reason he was in high school and won the state championship and the national championship in college. Football is still football, whether it’s the spread offense, whether it’s the West Coast or I-formation. Competitors usually find ways to win games. Tim’s going to be successful, no doubt. I just hope that the Denver Broncos have enough firepower and they just get better as a team. I’m a Broncos fan now and I want to see those guys do well and one guy doesn’t change a team. Tim Tebow had a lot of success at Florida because he had Aaron Hernandez and Percy Harvin and Louis Murphy and the Pounceys. He had really good players that played well around him and an excellent defense.”

Do you think Tebow will overcome the deficiencies in his throwing motion?:

“It’s a question if the team will. I think Tim will. This whole thing that one guy in one phase of the game is all of the sudden is going to put the Denver Broncos in the playoffs, it’s always going to be this way that the quarterback gets far too much criticism and too much glory when they win. He’ll manage whatever deficiency he has in throwing the ball, it’s just a matter of if the Broncos can improve their play enough to win.”

7 Responses to “Urban Meyer: Pressure Rests More on the Denver Broncos than on Tim Tebow”

It was immediately apparent that NFL sportscasters had it in for Tim Tebow prior to the 2010 draft. His detractors included the opinionated blow-hard non-athlete announcers as well as ex-players and coaches. “He had a bad throwing motion.” “He came out of the spread option offense that wasn’t proper preperation for an NFL quarterback.” And numerous other charges.What was distinctive about all the comments was the vehemence in which they were made and their relentlessness. I’ve been watching football for almost 60 years and I’ve never seen anything like it. Nothing even close. Tim Tebow was arguably the greatest college football player ever (Only Barry Sanders was his equal in my opinion). Yes, he didn’t have a classic throwing motion, but sports history is filled with great athletes who had unconventional styles (Stan Musial’s or even Babe Ruth’s batting stance: the many different delivery motions of Bobby Layne or Sonny Jurgenson.) And Tebow was an accurate and very effective college passer. Many famous football players came out of college offenses and defenses that differed from what the pros do. So why the vehemence? Why the relentlessness? It had the appearance right from the start that they weren’t just trying to critique Tebow’s potential, but destroy him. As odd and seemingly overly-dramatic as that sounds, it’s an appropriate description of what I’ve witnessed on television and in print. Regardless of his past success and strong religious faith, he is just a young man. How could he not be affected by such universal disparagement? And, of course, he has been. He now plays with great tenativeness, a seeming fear of failure that creates failure. And so they have been successful in destroying him, or at least his substantial talent. But why did they want to? And why is no one asking that question?